Digitized and Datafied Wildlife

Scientific practices and understandings of ecosystems and wildlife have transformed over the past 20 years, as researchers have developed new data collection tools, including GPS-telemetry, miniaturized tags, camera traps, and autonomous sound recording units. Scientists have brought together the massive, complex datasets produced with these tools with machine learning and AI techniques, resulting in the “datafication” of wildlife and ecosystems. This chapter brings together environmental anthropology, multispecies ethnography, and the study of technology to query the social and cultural dynamics of data production about wildlife and its consequences for wildlife management in the Anthropocene.